installment 2, 21-37

Last night, the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, we were at a party on Twenty-eighth Street. Jay Anderpaul, a stockbroker like Allen, was walking around with a smoldering joint held slackly in his lips, smoking it like a cigarette, thick gray fumes trailing him, and he was mumbling something about getting cocaine. Later, when I saw him come out of the bathroom with Jackie, a tall thin administrative assistant who works at my office, they were laughing and wide-eyed. I imagined the two of them getting it on later, her long skinny legs wrapped around his torso, a spider around your finger, but she eventually left with Ray, who’s at least 55, a photographer for fashion magazines, whom I thought was gay. She is tall and thin enough to be a model, but she doesn’t really care about that or any career. She’s young too, like all the girls at parties, in their twenties, happy to have a job even if it is a mindless job, answering the phone and folding up pieces of paper to go out in the mail; she could do more, as much as you give her, but she really wants to be out by six or six-thirty at the latest, which is ridiculous, so she gets irritable at seven-thirty or eight, red-faced a little, impatient to walk out of the office, cute. But she will still do what we ask her to. It’s not for everyone, the hours you put it to get a deal done. Even I am not sure it’s worth it.

Jay Anderpaul was fired from his job at First Union Swiss Bank for supposedly offering additional initial public offering stock to specific clients for higher commission rates and kickbacks to the corporate banking division; some of these guys, CEOs, would hire the investment bank for mergers advisory or managing stock issuance or other capital market services. Chetan Agarwal, the head of private client was supposedly out to get him, supposedly again because Chetan’s head was on the chopping block with the Securities Exchange Commission. Jay says he’s being made a scapegoat, that everyone in the industry has been doing it. But since he made over a million dollars last year, quadrupling his previous year, he doesn’t care. Yes, he worked hard, he said, but it’s not just work, it’s lubricating the gears, making sure everything turns round smoothly, screwing your buddies, lubricating your administrative assistant along the way if you can get away with it and if she’s hot. It’s knowing how to play the game and knowing that it is a game. “Let them sue me,” he said. “I’ll be ready and I will name names. They all knew about it, Chetan, Wilkes, Stewart, Welch, all the way up to Richard Johnson. Get real. They told us to do it. So fuck them. They paid me severance, I’ll keep my mouth shut, for now, as long as they don’t screw me.”

The Twenty-eighth Street party was at a luxurious apartment, two floors, circular staircase leading to a cut away bedroom, high up enough to overlook Broadway and Fifth Avenue downtown; open bar, good-looking bartender in a low cut deep-vee halter, tight leather pants bunched up in her crotch; music blaring, hip-hop, acid jazz and other dance crap. Numerous people from the law firm where I work were there, Joseph, Alex, Leann from Atlanta, Kate from Yale. Some friends of Allen, Jason who’s at Fidelity, Daniel who deals junk bonds for D.L.J. on the West Coast and their dates, a couple of chicks they met downtown, a blonde in a pale gray skirt slit up to her ass and an off-white sequined blouse with pearls and an Asian chick, tall and thin, from Hong Kong, who spoke with a British accent, had an M.B.A. from Harvard, now working at some ad agency downtown. Turns out she created the global ads for H.S.B.C. after they bought Bruce Wasserstein’s new firm. She was only twenty-seven and couldn’t stop talking. Cocaine, it seemed, coming out of her nose. Finally someone gave her a double vodka tonic with practically no tonic and after a couple of sips she quieted down. Later on, some people on L.S.D. showed up. Everyone that night was talking about the dream of making as much money as possible as quickly as possible, and getting out before the next leg down and the bottom of the whole market fell. It was a song really, and we were singing it, singing the dream of the beginning of summer, or, if you didn’t know the words, the language of money, what to say, just humming the tune, tapping your foot and by keeping time being part of the music.



THE NEXT WEEK I AM sitting on a plane to San Francisco to meet a client. We are waiting to taxi out of Laguardia. I have books of papers to review, but I drift to a situation with Carl Stiehl and Allen. Carl is my boss, Allen is my broker and also Carl’s broker, but not his primary one. He has two other brokers and is always trying out new guys at different firms. What the hell, he says, you transfer three or four hundred thousand dollars to their firm, they love you, and sometimes you get access to good information or deals, but you have to ask for it. Carl I would consider a sophisticated investor; he’s made a lot of money in the law business and in the stock market, knows the risks, and is cautious. But he holds the overall conviction and is committed to the principle that the sky is the limit, that’s the way he sees the market, you don’t know what tiny company could become the next Pfizer or General Electric of Microsoft. It’s one of his ideals, the infinite potential of the market as a rational information system and the intelligence and guts needed to be willing to shoulder properly assessed risk that should pay off, but Carl on any given day doesn’t feel satisfied, and he doesn’t believe he is rich enough to ward off whatever insecurity he believes the future might bring, so he always operates under the imperative to make more money now, as much as possible, as quickly as possible, that there isn’t enough time because of compound interest, opportunity cost, capital growth potential squandered to the passing of time.

Allen has been interested in making Carl a bigger client. In a sense, that’s his job. We are talking three-way on the phone about a basket of stocks, all companies that Allen’s firm, Moral Morgan, has strong recommendations on. They are all, or most, going up. Of course, as usual, Moral put on their buy recommendations after they started going up. But, it must be said, in fact, that I have made over a seventy thousand dollars, a third of my salary and bonus, so far this year on stock recommendations from Allen. Which is noteworthy since the major market indices are all down, especially the Nasdaq. But mostly following Allen’s advice, I’m making money. Of course, like everyone, I have lost a lot of money since the peak, but I guess it all depends on how you count it up, or what you count as your starting point. And of course, you feel smart when you’ve made money speculating. That may be the real incentive to investing, I think, the ability to make a judgement call on the future and be rewarded in concrete terms for being right. Carl says that as an investor that’s what he does, he looks ahead, as if he’s some ship captain looking out for icebergs, some watchman of risk. I too want to be able to look ahead and see the risks and profit from that foresight, from what I think the future holds. But it’s hard to know on analysis if you’re right. There are too many factors. Plus analysis becomes interpretation, and then you’re spinning around chasing your tail. So you’re kind of left just having to go ahead with what you’ve got, with what you know at the time, or you’re paralyzed and incapable of action. Allen says, the path to getting rich involves losing money, and you have to move on, fight another day, and that’s it. What he provides as a broker, sometimes, is a slight edge on the market, a little more and better information. Not illegal. Lot of times, it’s just looking at the numbers of a company, just a little bit differently than everyone else, just a little bit ahead of everyone else, or most people, I mean all the information trickles down too, you know, eventually. You talk to a friend who went to school with the C.F.O. of some company or a guy who works for the C.F.O., and you trade on a casual remark, if it works out, you buy your friend a case of wine, or box tickets to the Yanks or on Broadway, whatever he likes. If it doesn’t work out, well, you don’t mention it. Carl has made a pile of money this year too, I don’t know how much, but a multiple of what I have done, and he keeps intimating to Allen that these trades are a small portion of his total portfolio, almost leading him on. Allen keeps complaining that he doesn’t have a comprehensive picture of Carl’s total assets, and that he can’t advise him fully. But I guess Carl wants it that way. Why should he give him everything really? And Allen doesn’t care, doesn’t take it personally. To him, it’s just part of the business. People who think they’re smarter than everyone else always pay the most to learn the lesson that they’re not.

Carl has been a senior partner at Stephenson Roberts Altrow for years; he had been promoted to partner quickly because he came to understand early on that the paragon function of a lawyer at a corporate services firm, especially a small one, was to bring in new clients. He understood that the most successful lawyers were really salesmen. It’s just that what they’re selling is an intangible, confidence, security, judgement, advice. When you’re selling an intangible, you’re selling words, pieces of language arranged and formed to appeal to the buyer, creating or securing value in the agreements you’re making. So now Carl enjoys other people trying to sell him something intangible, an investment opportunity, the hope of getting rich or the fear which motivates security. Allen’s sales pitch is disarming. He doesn’t try to hide that he is selling you something, but he invites you to overlook that fact and just perceive him telling you why he likes a certain stock, and once you start listening to him, you take for granted that he’s selling it. Allen sometimes invests his own money in the stocks he recommends to his clients, when he’s allowed to by his company. Depending on the deal, sometimes he has access to information that involves institutional funds, though he’s not supposed to, when Moral is handling a large trade or something, and that starts to push the envelope of what’s legal. But sometimes through his contacts he hears about what some other firm is doing. And when he is excited about an opportunity or a company, he just lets us know and asks us if we want to join in. He tries to be like a friend. So we’re listening to Allen sell to us, “I think we buy Silver Ocala again, its down far enough, and the capital expenditure cycle is reaching a trough, that’s what we’re reading from Dave McCann, our equity strategist. So tech spending will have to pick up by the end of the year, and we ought to get in now, not when everyone else does, and that means pretty much now, I mean that’s why it’s a good buy, no one else wants it right now, they’re too scared that the bottom of the tech boom will fall out, but it already has, I’m telling you, it’s a buy here now. This is a great company, you know the financials, they have two billion in cash, and I know it’s down on the year, the stock price, but that’s what I’m saying, that’s why I’m buying, it’s not on any other recommend list either, yet. We’re getting in just a little bit ahead of everyone else, and that’s where we’ll make the money. Next week, or the week after, I don’t know when McCann’s piece is coming out, but soon. Clients first. It’s a great story for right now, I don’t think we should hold it very long, medium term, you know, three to six months, maybe more, we’ll see soon enough. Maybe longer. I know that where we’re at in the interest rate cycle, rates will go up, but not that fast, sure, they’ll go up eventually, whether by Greenspan or the market itself, but that’s not happening now, not yet. So these stocks will continue to run with money continuing to come in from the money markets that’s just sitting there. You’ve got probably trillions in money markets out there and I swear to you fund managers are going to start putting that capital to work, I know it. I’ve talked to these guys. It can’t go on staying on the sidelines, so it won’t, you watch.” And Carl finally agrees to buy one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars of three stocks, Ocala, more of a cable company, Cable Systems Crossing Technologies, a perennial favorite of his, that he’s been building a position in, and a natural gas explorer, while I buy about forty thousand of the same three stocks. However, I get the sense that for Carl, this is playing around money, that he doesn’t really believe Allen’s full story, but he recognizes that these stocks will go up, and he will sell them on his own judgement. Equities are volatile now, but to Carl, that’s no reason to be pessimistic. He knows that volatility represents potential profit if you’re willing to shoulder the risk, and he likes it. He’s a bull, and he always sees opportunities to buy and own, and he’s always looking for growth, upward moves. We speculate. That’s what we do to make real money, work is just instrumental to paying living expenses. You could never make enough money through work alone, I don’t think. Not enough to build wealth. That’s not what work is about, and that’s not what the market is about. Financial security includes investing, there’s no way around it. And to be a successful investor, sooner or later you realize it’s about exploiting differences in what people know, which, in the end, is the market.

These are some of the things I have tried to learn from Carl. But what do I know? You never really know for sure how something’s going to work out—isn’t that the universal experience? Risk and uncertainty are inherent in looking ahead. I don’t think I have some special power to see how things are going to turn out; in fact, I’d suppose, if you put me in the spotlight, most people have similar imaginations as I do, regular intimations of the future. It’s just that, for the most part, we, or they, are so interlocked within what we already believe the future holds that we tend to ignore this imagery. How can I tell Carl is headed for trouble? I don’t know. He wants to be confident, but you can feel the anxiety in his voice. Like he’s expecting the market to just keep going up. I don’t know how he could be so sure, he doesn’t know anything I don’t know, he doesn’t have any access to facts that I don’t have. It’s just his style. But that’s how we project ourselves into the future, our style, how we carry ourselves. We all do it, and we’re all right or wrong around half the time. But it seems to me that the more you’re able to live in the present and not have a preconceived notion of what the future holds, your images of the future, when they occur, have a greater chance of being accurate. Think about it: the man who ends up living the life he’s conceived for himself since childhood, he’s the guy who’s most amazed at how things turn out. It’s like he’s completely astounded that his teenage daughter is getting drunk and giving blowjobs to the cool boys in school, the school which was the reason they moved to the suburbs in the first place.

Sometimes I think I became a lawyer because I had the sense that no one was listening to me, that no matter how substantial I thought what I had to say, people just ignored me. But as an attorney, people pay you for your advice, so they actually listen; they’re invested in hearing what you have to say. Some of the time. Sure, it’s a lot of work. But that’s irreducible in this life. But regarding the future, if you think about it too much, a logical question arises: what do you really know about what’s going to happen, are you sure about it, how do you act to control it, if you can, or perhaps you just let it ride, let it all happen, unfold and watch it. Exploit it. Furthermore, how do you get people to listen to you without being considered a Cassandra? Well, first they have to trust you. Or believe they are going to get some good, some profit or benefit from what you have to say, or be protected from some harm. It’s like buying an insurance policy to mitigate the risk of expected mishaps or shortfalls, in the belief, almost superstitiously, that if you pay the money, it won’t happen, as if there were some kind of causal or theological relation, giving money to the church, to the representatives of God. And where does that money pile up? Well, that’s what the capital markets are all about it. The priests loan it out, or use it as leverage for more. But what are we buying with those payments if not making some kind of payment on the future? It’s as though we’re paying money into the future, installments, trying to buy it, the future, but we can’t afford it all now, so we have to take out a loan and we pay little by little to some company that actually holds it, like a promissory note or a title, a piece of paper with writing on it, it’s a contract, an agreement, a policy. But events do occasionally intrude. Risk can’t be wished away. Once I put it that way, however, as a logical question—can you know anything about the future and can you communicate it to someone else—I don’t have an answer. Of course, in a specific technical situation, in an area of which I have legal expertise, I can tell you what is likely to happen as a result of option one, two or three. But in general, you just go by feel and grope your way through the dark using the few guide lights you can muster. That’s all my intimations of the future amount to, in fact, guide lights.

Later that week, the first week of summer, I was supposed to see Gina Stephens, whom I’ve dated off and on for the last year and a half, but she couldn’t make it at the last minute and we had to reschedule. Gina is at First Charter, but wants to get out of the business, get married to someone who will deal with all the needs and services, and have kids. I met Gina through a dating service that Allen had recommended. They matched us up by our biographical sketches, and one of the things I liked about her was that she didn’t ask any questions about my background which were in the biographical material I gave to the dating service. She was whip smart, thin and ambitious. When we met she said, “So you’re Mark Price. That’s an interesting name.”

“Do you think so? I find it kind of plain. I work for a firm called Stephenson.”

“I know. We hire you guys all the time.”

“Right. You’re at First Charter. I almost forgot.” We were sitting at a restaurant on 21 Street; I’m having a scotch and soda and she’s drinking a lager, her bare legs crossed at the knees, and my eyes kept following them up. She smiled and kept talking.

“I like the business, but the hours are deathly. I mean, come on, you need a life, don’t you?”

“Definitely.”

“We were in China for nine days and we left on four hours notice. I didn’t even have a chance to go home and pack a bag. What is that? Is that civilized?”

“No. What were you doing there?”

“A potential investment in the main export bank, but the whole thing is just too complicated; they weren’t ready, we were going to go in with a private equity firm and another group of partners, but the rules of ownership were so complex, nobody could agree on the draft, and so it’s like still in long term planning mode. It’ll probably happen in five years or so, with the next wave of investment.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“It was, but you know, big banks getting bigger, it’s kind of monotonous too, boring, the inevitability. Of course there will be a dramatic struggle over who takes control and the partnership will be riddled with internal conflicts; that’s the way these things always are. After you’ve seen it at a certain level, it just sort of repeats itself over and over, with different companies, people, the only thing, the numbers multiply exponentially, the bank sort of ends up loaning money to itself, I mean, not exactly, but by the time you add the whole transaction up, it just becomes one huge blob of money on a balance sheet projected into the future, god knows how many payments coming in every month, like clockwork supposedly. Sometimes I dream about the whole thing collapsing.”

“Whoa. That’s getting apocalyptic. I kind of like that.”

“I know, but you know, this sort of thing happens from time to time. The system’s pretty flexible, it’ll recover, adjust, reshape itself, some entities will be hurt. . .”

“What do you mean?”

“Institutions. Others will stand back and watch and learn and next time around they’ll have another layer of risk controls but they’ll push it again, out to the edge. That’s the nature of the business.”

I had read her biography, but it wasn’t sticking in my mind, other than the fact that she worked at First Charter. Her mother is an artist and a professor in North Carolina, and her dad, they’re split up, was an economist at the treasury department and then at the U.N., development policy writer. At the bank, she knew Larry and occasionally was called in to do some work for him. It became kind of a turn-on to me that she worked for my client, and it made me want to do it with her even more, but we didn’t end up fucking for a couple of dates. I guess she wanted to check me out a bit, see if my manners were up to snuff. Luckily, they were. It was on or about the third date, and we went back to her apartment and I pushed her back on to an easy chair, kneeled down and hiked up her skirt and pulled off her panties and spread her legs out and smashed my face into her cunt which was sweaty and salty. I had picked her up after work and we were both tired but we had a bottle of white wine which rejuvenated us for the fucking. Her pussy was a delicate and meaty strip with pearly beads of sweat running along the edge of the opening and I pushed my tongue in it and thought about fucking her meanwhile she was starting to gasp and come and she started beating her hands on the top of my head, one tightly balled into a fist, the other open, slapping me on the side of the forehead almost poking me in the eye and then she started scratch my face, so I pulled my face out of her pussy and started to get my dick out and put on a rubber but she said no and slipped it in her mouth for a few minutes then asked me to fuck her, her legs splayed out on propped up on the armrests of the soft red and blue colored easy chair. I like her but it’s not an exclusive relationship I don’t think and it isn’t going anywhere, as I’m just not ready for a committed relationship, and my sense, with her, is that I’d always be trying to live up to her expectation, and that turns me off. She could make a lot of money in banking, but she says she wants to get out of the business, which I can totally understand. For now, at any rate, she takes a professional attitude towards it, which pays off dealing with clients and getting the job done; she’s a Stanford M.B.A., and they like her: athletic, runs, plays tennis, but soft with sandy blond hair. We have had sex about ten times, but not recently. We’ve both been too busy, and I am wondering if the summer will allow us to get it together at all.

That first weekend of the summer, when Allen and I went out to our house on Accabonac, we pick up Elaine at a bar in Amagansett where some people we know are drinking, a girl Allen knows, and end up snorting quite a bit of cocaine. We finally bring her back to the house and end up taking turns fucking her. She is very hyped-up on blow and then wants to do it on all fours while giving Allen a blowjob. It is a little weird looking at each other and her between us, her back all stretched out and undulating side to side. It is dark and there is moonlight coming off the water, it’s still cool outside at night, and we keep the lights off so we can see outside. She keeps sliding Allen’s dick out of her mouth and saying she wants us to come at the same time. It is somewhat embarrassing.

Back at the office during the work week, Carl keeps wanting to talk about Cable Systems Crossing Technologies, CSXT, the telecom stock he’s invested in. Carl has been mesmerized by its steady up performance the last several months. He started buying shares three years ago, when the company was in the process of securing the rights to an underwater intercontinental cable system in an agreement with old British Telecom, and they had borrowed all this money from the banks and followed with a series of high-yield bond issues; as a result, people started to like them and the market determined them to be an integral piece of the backbone for global data transmission. They were also expanding in the U.S., buying up regional telecom companies with all the leveraged debt. The stock price started to go up and Carl started to buy in, his initial investment of over two hundred thousand at a price somewhere in the thirties—as far as I know about it-- has tripled with the stock now in the nineties, and Carl has continued to add to his position throughout as the value of the stock has ratcheted up, buying even more on the dips. He is excited about it now, understandably, and I think he owns probably close to two million in it now and that’s why he can’t stop talking about it, at least when he’s around me, as he knows I own it too. In fact, each of us owns what is respectively a significant number of shares of this company, using Allen as the broker, though Carl owns much more than I do; significance, however, as the word suggests, is subjective, how much you value a thing or an amount of a thing. I bought a small amount in the high fifties in part because Carl was still buying. Actually, the amount I own is at least as large a percentage of my net worth, so presumably I should be as concerned, but I’m not.

In the back of Carl’s mind, there’s a cloying, scratching, nerve-racking annoyance that he wants to be richer, which I can understand and indeed in which I too share, as I believe everyone does, at least every adult male American, and at least half the female, and probably round the world as well—it must be a human thing, the need and the desire, the eros, for security, and the reasoning that a personal store of value is a hold on that sought after security, the object of desire. But as I cannot believe in an omnipotent God who will save you in the end and relieve you of all your petty fears and desires, nor can I wholly commit to the value of storing up as much money as possible. I don’t want to be totally tied down to the money I make. Nevertheless, I recognize the need and the desire in myself as well as others. For Carl, it’s not just the money and it’s not just the status. It is something more fundamental and pure, even animalistic perhaps, but quantifiable nonetheless—and that seems the beauty of it to him—no matter how zealous his desire for more, there remains a definite numerical value to its status, a number that gives a present accounting, and there is always another, larger number that defines his goal. The mixture of unlimited desire and discrete numerical valuation at every step enlivens him, gratifies his effort and his reach for solidity, substance. Like liquid cooling, congealing, solidifying. That’s why, I think, Carl loves this company, Cables Crossing, so much.

We had worked with Harold Stemming, its chief, before, indirectly, as the legal advisor to Jack Samson, who owned Jupiter Satellite Cellular, which had been acquired by Stemming at Cables Crossing several years back, and that’s when Carl first got passionately interested in the conglomerate. There were reasons for that and subsequent mergers, combining wireless and cable, cross-selling and marketing, synergies, advertising packaging, content delivery efficiency and ownership of the backbone of the Internet, all flags unfurled and let flutter by the company and its minions of bankers—Larry provided the financing through First Charter at very attractive rates in return for part of the advisory fee. Brokers, attorneys, accountants, marketing and public relations and communications consultants, at times it seemed as if the entire business services economy was part of the effort. The overarching urge to the idea was ambition, size, growth, and hunger and there was something in that that Carl saw of himself, a little guy who had gotten bigger and bigger by being smart and swift and through determination and work, above all, had become strong. Through an inner strength, deep within himself, he, a fighter, had become a winner. Of course, there were hundreds of companies like this, and we followed them all and were involved professionally with some of them. There was so many transactions and exchanges going on, stock offerings, mergers. It felt like we were at the center of something magical and important at the time. Cables Crossing, as the company was known, earned a reputation as a scrappy up and comer that would survive the wash out, and was now poised to take on the big boys. It would, in the end, however, take on so much debt, borrow so much money, dozens of billions of dollars, from the world’s major banks and the totality of the corporate bond market, virtually, collectively, all the owners of capital in the world, it seemed, and as its stock price broke through each subsequent level and kept climaxing higher and higher, it seemed justified in continuing to borrow and pay interest at every possible rate, banks and bond holders happy to collect the payments. What Stemming was doing with all that money, making acquisitions all over the world, entering into partnerships and corporate sharing agreements, each time handing out money to himself and his executive management in the form of large bonuses, options, and personal loans that would never have to be repaid, and to outside partners in cash and contracts and consulting fees, then buying real estate through the company, stock in yet other companies, other properties, anything any broker or business advisor or consultant could sell, in the end it turned out the company would never make a dime; as a whole, the company had nil free and clear earnings. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time, the present being a tangled knot of the past and the future.

This blog is a novel.

This blog is a novel.

Compensation
A novel
(Part 1 of Money is a Language)
by W. James
New York, NY



It’s necessary that every man and child, free and slave, male and female, the whole city, ceaselessly sing to itself these songs, which are changing all the time yet hold themselves together multifaceted, so that for the singers there be an ever insatiable desire for and pleasure in the songs. Plato’s Laws, 665c

Let this now be the final opinion, even though strange: the songs have become our laws, ibid, 799e10.



Looking back on it now, it all seems as if it happened at once, and what I didn’t know about my friend Allen probably doesn’t matter. It’s just that it wasn’t obvious all along. What that says about me, I do not know. And Carl, my former boss, I still think, is morally upstanding and well intentioned. Just because it didn’t work out for him at the end, losing all that money in the market, doesn’t mean he’s a loser or a fool, not in any transcendent sense, regardless of how unfortunate he may think the circumstances of his situation.
I try not to be judgmental, but in the end, I am. Everyone is. How can you not? Carl got caught in a position in which he never thought he would find himself. And so did I. In the end, you have to make some judgment on other people. It’s not that I see some good guy and some bad guy or that Carl is stupid. Far from it. But I can’t say that I feel sorry for him. Ultimately, what he did led to how it turned out for him, and his investment decisions can be seen as foolish. But I don’t hold anyone totally responsible for what happens to him. Yes, we make choices, of course, but that’s not the whole story, I don’t think. Nor can I say I wouldn’t wish it on him. In fact, I did and, in a sense, even had a hand in it. In a way, I wanted to see what would happen to him and what he would do.
We’re all basically the same, myself included, self-interested individuals looking to secure what’s best for us, what we think is best for us. As for enlightened self-interest, well, probably not. Crass self-interest is more like it. And that includes watching other people get burned and taking some measure of satisfaction or even enjoyment in it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be, men who look out for ourselves primarily and, if we have anything, what belongs to us? And if that means the other guy loses out, well, that’s the way it is. I’d rather admit this than try to maintain a front of hypocrisy. And sometimes, quite often if looked at honestly, when it comes to screwing someone over and getting something out of it, even if it’s just a little satisfaction, we give a little shove.
But like I said, I try not to be judgmental. None of us escaped unharmed. But that’s the nature of things, the way it is. What follows is how it happened at the time, just a few months ago, in fact.


“MY LIFE IS KILLING ME, it’s like a demon crawling up my back, claws raking into my shoulder, reaching for my neck, my scalp.”
“You keep saying that Allen, what are you going to do, kill yourself? What do you mean?”
“Nothing, Price. I’m not going to kill myself. It’s better to live for nothing than not to live at all.”
“What are you talking about? The thrill of the fuck not enough for you? What is it, you’re not getting enough pussy?”
“You know something? I hate to admit it—I know it sounds superficial, but no matter what anyone says, it all comes down to looks for me. I wouldn’t date a girl that’s not good-looking.”
“Yes, but it all depends on what you think is good.”
“Yeah, I know. Like this chick I met over New Year’s, Valerie. I met her last summer out at Montauk. She’s got a place at Ditch Plain this summer.”
I vaguely remember meeting Valerie at the New Year Eve’s party. We were extremely wasted on an assortment of drugs and I recall Allen going off with a petite and delicate girl with a finely boned face and penetrating eyes. My name is Mark Price, and I’m sitting in my car with my friend, Allen Lewis. We are driving east on the Long Island Expressway for the first weekend of the summer. Allen and I had arranged the summer rental of a small beach house on Accabonac Harbor. The actual structure lacked any luster, just a box, but it sat on a dazzling, well-lighted spot, a thin golden tongue of sand surrounded by Gardiner’s Bay, Accabonac Harbor, and Napeague Bay in the distance. I’m driving my convertible, and there is, as usual in these situations of clarity, bright stunning sunlight, wind whirling through the cockpit—we are living in the present and thus have no idea what will happen in the future, what form the rearrangement of the present will take. That’s why I specialize, as best as I can, in living in the present, whatever the price. It isn’t even that I don’t care to live with the constant expectation of what will come, but that it doesn’t matter: I get married, I make partner at the firm, I buy a mortgage on a house in Connecticut or Westchester so I can take the Metro North into Manhattan rather than the Long Island Rail Road or New Jersey Transit, plus the real estate is a better investment there; I have two kids—everyone has two kids if you notice, and so will I, no doubt. And there you are, bitching and hoping for the tuition to send your two kids to a good enough school. In contrast to that, there’s a certain formlessness to living in the present that gives a sense of freedom, probably deceptive I admit, like the dream of a grand oceanic expanse of the possible, a dream of unlimited pleasure and possibility, abstract potentiality. Yes, in a way, it is an irresponsible way of thinking, but I have always run aground on the same conclusion, and have argued vociferously for it on drunken occasions, that if you can get yourself far enough out there, why not just stay? Out there. As long as possible. And just see what happens. Sure, you’ve got to take care of business, and yes that implies work, a job, money to pay for a piece of waterfront property and ease into the process of getting old rich. For being poor when you’re old is a particularly American fear. But why let these basic goals comprehend your life? It’s not as though it’s all that difficult, in the end. Many of these things work themselves out. They just happen—or do they? Regardless, why torture ourselves so much with the idea of self-improvement? Why not just be what we are? Or perhaps what I’m afraid of is facing up to the limits that define us as individuals, not just death, but the finality of every decision taken at every step in your life, grades in school, college, law school, making your millions and all the rest. If God exists, I hate to say it, he’s not much of a sculptor. I’m sure I’m missing something: biology, evolution, family, love and happiness, Christianity, Judaism, cultural conservatism, prudence. I just can’t take all that seriously. I’m an atheist. I just decided one day, when I was about fifteen, that I would try not believing in God and just see what happened. So, in disbelief, I live in the present. Surprisingly, I’ve found that this gives me the ability to see a little bit into the future. Not far off, though sometimes I fool myself into actually believing that I’m seeing decades or centuries into the future. Not perfectly, but I do get images, potentialities. For instance, sitting in the car complaining about his life is Allen, and suddenly there occurs in my mind an outlined figure of him later in the summer, and now it starts to come into focus, the form filling in with polarized glare-free technicolor, he’s splashing and frolicking in the surf and sun, dark hairy chest, muscular pecs and abs cut, and he’s surrounded by a rich blue hue, diamond droplets of spray scattering violet light around as he jumps and smiles and laughs, like a picture in a spring J. Crew catalogue. There are bikini clad girls, skinny, lying, sitting and standing around, on and in the sand, bony hips jutting out, golden skin—not weird, but typical images, like ideals providing a goal to which we can strive--and then Allen leaps up and forward—I can’t tell if he’s catapulting himself toward the shore or out to sea—but it’s clear that he does a somersault, a full flip and then flops onto the wavy surface, the light purple and blue and gold painted on the ocean, then he disappears into a bank of white foam and is gone, leaving a bathtub-sized hole in the surf, an image of the future. Behind my mirrored shades, I blink and the instant changes, jumps back to the present reality, and my eyesight flashes back to where I am and trains on the LI.E., gleaming metal reflecting chrome reflecting red and orange plastic flashing in the white glare of pale concrete.
I refocus and hear Allen saying, “Yeah, but you know what, Mark, that’s just it. Getting laid is not the problem. Not that I’m not getting enough snatch, but I want more, not more pussy necessarily, although that would be alright, but something more. The city is so boring. It’s like I’ve already done everything and there’s never enough time, no time to do what I have to do and no time to do what I want to do. I wake up and it seems like the day is already gone and I’m out for drinks. I want to go places, Patagonia, Thailand, Europe, you know. The Hamptons are great. I love going out, all the clubs and restaurants, the beach. But I hate all those people. Half of them are from two towns over from where I grew up on Long Island, half are from New Jersey, and then there are a few sprinkled in from half way around the world. Do you remember Imran Aroshi, that guy from Iran, or Iraq or Pakistan or wherever, but he’s Jewish somehow? The guy who sells cocaine and ecstasy? He was in our house last summer. He used to hang out by the pool or in the Jacuzzi with a different blonde chick every week, his hands all over her. I tried to get in the tub one time and started talking to this beauty he had in there, some ski instructor from Utah—turns out she’s a lesbian or just told him she was to get him off her back, but very good looking. And the asshole starts to freak out, saying she’s with him, et cetera. Meanwhile, she’s rolling her eyes at the sky and I just said fuck it, see you later, smiled at the girl and left. Later on I saw them at some party. She was totally ignoring him. I should have moved in on her and screwed her that night just to fuck with this guy’s head.”
“I don’t know why you even bothered with that scene last year, Allen. You bitched and moaned about it all year, bitterly, yet every weekend there you were, I know I know I was there too, sitting in traffic from the Midtown Tunnel all the way out the L.I.E. or the Northern or whichever route you take. And look at us now. Here we are again. Why are we doing this? We’re just one more German sports car in a sea of B.M.W.s, Jags and Mercedes.”
“Yeah, no one wants an American car anymore.”
“For a long time now. Except for the S.U.V.s.”
“Maybe I should get an S.U.V. They’re pretty cool.”
“Maybe.”
“No, I’m going to lease a Porsche.”
“Really?’
“Yeah.”
“When?
“Soon.” Allen snorts. “Yeah. This year I’m through with that scene. All those people are too young for me now, I realize. And the owners of that house, that gay lawyer couple. I’m so psyched that we got this place this year. It’ll be quiet, kind of a retreat, we won’t have to see people if we don’t want to, it’s on the water. It’s great. It’s going to be great. I want to meet a real woman, someone my age.”
“You’re hypocritical, Allen. What are you going to do about it? Why don’t you do something with your life.”
“I am. I am. I’m not in a share this year.”
“Right, as if that one thing will change anything. You’re always complaining about this, that, sex, money, your boss, the market.”
“So what, Mark? Everyone does. I’m just making conversation. My life’s not bad, I know. I’m lucky, really, what I’ve got. I mean, I’m successful, good looking . . .”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“Hey, I’m good looking in the sense of okay looking, not a model, but you know, pretty good, better than average.”
“Whatever that is. You do work out.”
“Yeah, I’m getting bigger. Thanks for the compliment. But I want to get even bigger. I’m just saying, Mark, I mean, doesn’t everyone complain? I shouldn’t really. Is that what you’re getting at? I guess you’re right. I’ve got no reason to complain.”
“Forget it, Allen.”
“It’s alright. I do want to meet someone though this summer.”
“A girl.”
“A girl. A woman. Whatever. What the hell, I don’t know. I really like Valerie. Who knows? Maybe she’s the one.”
“What are you talking about, Allen, the one? Like that twenty-year-old from Australia you met in Hawaii this winter? What was her name again? Was she even Jewish?” I say, my eyes straight ahead piercing the future, the traffic streaming to the left and the right of us, as though brushing off our shoulders, as I pass everyone; we’re funneling through the empty space that happens to exist before us for a moment in the middle lane, and like everyone else thronged on the road, sensing in the speed the power of the thrumming engine as my own freedom, an opening to shoot through, like an arrow darting to its target over a cluttered field.
“Yeah, you mean Diana. Her? I’m through with the younger chicks, Mark. I think I need an older woman. The problem with Diana and chicks her age is they’ve got nothing to say, absolutely nothing. It’s frustrating, I sit there and say, do you want to do this, do you want to do that, and she’s like okay okay. I hate that. Have you ever noticed that women don’t seem to know what they want?”
“You mean girls.”
“Whatever the distinction you want to make, Mark. It’s like they’re always looking to us to tell them what to do and then they fly off the handle and get all huffy and irritated and hate us for telling them what to do as if they knew all along what they were doing. But are we any different, really, Mark? I mean what the hell are we doing?”
“Living in the present, man.”
“Yeah, I’m just trying to get what I want. Is there anything wrong with that? The pursuit of happiness?”
“No, Allen, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Right.”
“But that’s bullshit, that you’re interested in older women.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Older women are much more likely to see through you, or they want you for the money you make, and have kids.”
“Not necessarily. But anyway, didn’t you keep up a relationship with that girl from Hawaii on e-mail for months?”
“Well, yeah, but so what? She had a great pussy, gripping, but forget her. I only fucked her one time. She e-mailed me the other day, I just deleted it. She doesn’t know what she wants and I’m sick of girls like that. Fuck her. No.”
“Okay, Allen. But isn’t Valerie like twenty-two?”
“She is, I think twenty-four, but she’s different.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No I’m not. Don’t be an asshole, Price.”
“I’m just trying to hold you to what you’re saying. Whatever happened to Julia, that aerobics instructor?”
“I don’t know. It was weird, man. We met online, it goes so fast, you know so much about the other person through e-mail. When we met, I was relieved—she was how she looked in the photos she posted. Great body, worked out a lot, really hot, thirty, going to school to be a teacher, Jewish, I really liked her. And she liked me too. We had sex the first time we went out. I don’t know what happened.”
“What happened.”
“I called you that night, remember, we had just finished fucking and I went to take a shower and tried to call you from the bathroom and left a message. But what happened with her? I called her and called her for like two weeks and she never called back.”
“Maybe she just wanted to get laid.”
“Yeah. Fuck her. That night, after I called you and left a message, I went back in and she was lying on the bed with the covers swirled around her, and she was just quiet, staring at me with this look in her eye. Unlike other chicks, she didn’t say anything, she just looked at me, like she was judging me or something. I mean, I looked pretty good, just coming out of the shower, this was a couple of months ago and I wasn’t as big as I am now, but I had been working out a while. She didn’t even try to say anything. It was really uncomfortable.”
Allen has a cruel piece that he unleashes regularly on himself as well as others. When you first meet him, he seems a likeable guy and you can’t imagine him hurting anyone. But beneath that is something cynical. He also has become a bit of a body builder, works out at the gym everyday, or at least Monday through Friday or Thursday in the summer, so he can exhibit a mildly threatening physical presence. In fact, working out is the one area where you see Allen’s discipline and work ethic. You know that he had to work hard when he first started in the brokerage business, but you wouldn’t know it hanging out with him now, all he does is party and fuck. His job consists of following investment reports put out by his company and other sources of information that he’s cultivated over the last couple of years and advising his clients on managing their investments accordingly. He’s a good-looking guy, about six feet, a hundred and seventy pounds.
“So, who’s this Valerie?” I’m trying to remember meeting her on New Year’s Eve and then I start to see in my mind Allen and a girl slumped back on couches fucked up in one of the rooms in Jeff Baxter’s penthouse apartment on Fifty-first Street, but I can’t remember anything about her, I just have an emptiness, a vacuum, in my mind. Allen has mentioned her throughout the spring, but it hasn’t really registered as anything significant beyond another girl he’s been dating. I can’t even remember if he’s said he has fucked her, but now he’s talking as if he has.
“She’s hot, Mark, really good looking. You met that night, didn’t you? Remember? Small, petite, dark-haired.”
“Barely, Allen. There were a lot of cute girls there that night.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve been seeing each other.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Beuell. Valerie Beuell.
“How do you spell that?”
“I don’t know, asshole. She’s from Connecticut. Her dad was a communications executive at 3M, I think.”
“How old did you say she was?”
“Mid-twenties. Like me.”
“Allen, what are you talking about, you’re turning thirty this year.”
“Whatever.”
“So what’s up with this chick?”
“She’s great, Mark. I think I could get serious about her.”
“What do you mean, serious, Allen?”
“You know. Monogamy.”
“Monogamy. You’re kidding. Is she good in bed?”
“Fuck you, Price.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ll meet her, Mark, and see what I mean. She’s a fun girl, non-pretentious, non-high maintenance, parties, drinks, has her own friends. Likes the beach, surfs, smokes pot.”
“Right, we met at New Year’s. I’m starting to picture her now, skinny, small useless tits. . . .”
“Asshole.”
“Well, I’m just trying to remember, to see if she’s the one. I was pretty fucked up that night, if I recall.”
“I know. You were with that girl, what was her name? Rachel. What a slut.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“No offense, Mark, but that girl was some piece of ass, with that short skirt, cheap leopard skin pattern, in the middle of winter?”
“It was a very warm New Year’s Eve, Allen.”
“And that halter top she was wearing! Come on. Where did she come from?”
“She knew Jeff’s sister, I think. They went to Columbia together. She’s a New York City kid. I liked her. You’re just prejudiced against anyone who’s not middle class, white and suburban.”
“What did you do that night?”
“You mean with her?”
“Yes.”
“I forget.”
“It was a great party though, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. But who is Valerie? I can’t quite picture her.”
“Man, I’ve been telling you. You met her, too, zombie.”
“Did I like her?” I say laughing.
“I don’t know. You don’t remember. You were as fucked up as I can ever remember seeing you. Remember New Year’s Eve the year before? When everyone thought there would be a technology breakdown in all the computer systems in the banks and nothing happened? That computers would freak out when the last two digits of the year went from ninety-nine to O.O. and that all that data would be lost? And nothing happened. What a joke. That liquidity ramped up the last leg of the bull market, you know? We made so much money the next few years.”
“We did too.”
“It was great.”
“I know. But that night, what a joke. Nothing happened.”
“What assholes we were.”
“Yeah. Friends of mine had to work all night at banks and brokerages and mutual funds and clearing houses. Losers.”
“Sucks for them. What did we do that year?”
“I can’t remember.”
“I don’t think I even knew you then.’
‘We were just starting to hang out.”
“This year’s party though, Jeff’s party, was great. I was so fucked up. Did you meet her there?”
“No, I met her last summer out at Montauk, surfing.”
“She surfs.”
“She’s pretty good at it too. Not as into it as I am, but it’s cool to have a chick that likes sports. She went to Yale.”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know you.”
“No. I don’t know where she went to school. I can’t remember. Connecticut College? U. Conn. New Hampshire, somewhere? She dropped out. Some place like that. Maybe in Boston, somewhere in New England. She’s cool though. I like her. What difference does it make anyhow, where she went to college? I’m not intellectual, I went to University of Delaware, total party school, got straight Bs, a few Cs. It has absolutely no bearing on how well you do in life, what school you went to. Look at all these brainiac nerds. They can’t even have a normal conversation. All they can talk about is books or computers.”
“Hey those guys make a lot of money now. I know a guy, writes software, who got a lot of stock options from his company and exercised them for over two million dollars. Just bought two condos in the Florida Keys.”
“Fuck that, Mark. You should give me his number. I know you went to law school at N.Y.U. and everything, and I think that’s great and everything. But what school you went to doesn’t necessarily mean that much. It can get you into the Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley training program. And it definitely adds to your resume and will get it to the top of the pile and get you a call, but screw that anyway though. You’re a lawyer, you know what I mean. I mean, look how much money I made the last couple of years, and I don’t have an M.B.A. or anything. Where did you go to school, anyway, Mark?”
“Bennington. But sure, Allen, I know what you mean. Don’t get upset. I know you don’t have to go to H.B.S. to do well. It helps though. Look at Bush.”
“Yeah, right.” We’re stopped in traffic now and a sweet whiff of auto exhaust rises, intoxicating as it touches the back of my nose and throat.
“This is so slow,” says Allen.
“There’s no other way here.”
“We could check the Northern.”
“Maybe. We’ll see what we get at the next exit.”
“What the fuck are all these people doing slowing down.”
“Probably a merge coming up.”
“Or an accident.”
“No, it’s probably a merge. Look up there. See?”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Forget it. Let’s put the top up and turn on the A.C.” I also turn on the radio and intercept a news report on Bloomberg about a man arrested in Tompkins Square Park for killing pigeons, luring them with food and grabbing them by the neck between his thumb and index finger and flipping them over his wrist. Then on the hour, they update the Friday markets, the Dow is up, the Nasdaq is down eighteen, which isn’t anything as its been down for months now, or a year, and so many people have lost money, but on the surface at least, you don’t really notice. Everyone has a brand new car still shining, you can see the whole world reflected in the gleam, growling, not like some busted up old truck but a musical buzz, a bass intonation with just the slightest metallic clink of pistons firing and gears meshing. Everyone’s lost money, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Life goes on in the so-called real economy, as if there aren’t any consequences from the financial markets, even though trillions in market capitalization evaporated. The S&P is down for the year, but up for the day, a squiggle. Companies aren’t going broke, and the banks aren’t going under. Yes, there is some blood being let, shareholder lawsuits in the making, but the effects have been spread out over a hundreds of thousands of investors, and there have to be losers, that’s the nature of the game, and we all know that, anyone who is a player. The losers keep quiet, except for the occasional quirky guy who has been taken for a ride in a limo, dropped off in the middle of nowhere, no phone, no money, no credit card; you hear about people who have lost their life savings, they pop up in the Wall Street Journal, the victim of some rogue broker in the Midwest suing Lehman Brothers for four million dollars, but, I mean, the institutions haven’t collapsed, they’ve adjusted, people haven’t pulled their money out of mutual funds. Where else would they put it? You have to do something with it, that’s the nature of money. It’s not inert because it’s not a thing that can just sit around. An S.U.V. groans as it sails by, gleaming, black, hulking.
“There’s so much money sitting around on the sidelines right now,” says Allen, as if reading my mind. “That’s why I’m not worried about the markets, man. There is a lot of liquidity out there. I’ve got one account with six million in cash. I can’t believe it. I mean, how fucking stupid is that. It’s just sitting there. He’s losing money in cash. But, to him, he thinks money holds its value. It doesn’t. It’s got to do something or else it pisses itself away. Or someone else does something with it, uses it as a reserve to give somebody else margin, just an entry on an account balance.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? It’s his money. Keep talking to him. Tell him it’s going to be alright. When the market starts up again, he’ll buy into it. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety out there. But you know what, Mark? Fuck it. It’s only money. It comes and goes and you work for it, I work for it, but you can’t constantly live in the shadow of it, like some towering pile of shit. You have to set it aside in your mind and live your life. Don’t get me wrong. It’s important and you’ve got to work. I work hard every day, well not every day, but I earn my money. Is my job harder than other jobs? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Sales is a great job and it’s lucrative, but it’s not easy. But nothing is easy. You use your personality in sales and that’s it. Sometimes I feel like I’m using it up, and I’ll get to the point in my career where I’ll have nothing left, and that’ll be it, I’ll be nothing. But there are other aspects to pitching stocks, you’ve got to stay organized, pay attention to the details. The main thing is you have to be persistent and you have to be true to yourself. They’ll trust you, that what you’re telling them is the truth. I never lie to a client. Ever.”
“Come on, that’s bullshit.”
“You know what I mean. You never lie in a way that you’ll get caught. Everything you say has to be totally true to the best of your knowledge, at the time. Little by little, some of what you say about this stock or that stock comes out as not exactly true, but, hey, people understand. It’s not like I have total knowledge. Nobody does. And everybody understands that. Nobody knows which way for sure some price is going, up for awhile, drops down, hangs around. Nobody has absolute knowledge. Yes, for a short period of time, if you know something is going to happen, you can trade on it. Your customers learn that you’re not perfect, but they start to see that you’ve got their best interest at heart—they have to believe it in the end or they pull their money, right? So anyone who’s been with you for a while implicitly trusts you. And you can’t take that trust lightly.”
I look over at Allen and see he really believes what he’s saying. I’ve got four hundred thousand invested with him. Do I trust him? I guess yes. Well, not really. But I’m not pulling my money either. He’s a convenient conduit, and I can glean information from him. I’m young, I’ll make more money. Hell, Allen’s made me a lot of money over the last year. I’d like to be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty-five or thirty-six. And Allen’s already got a couple of million in his portfolios. He’ll probably be worth eight figures in a couple of years. Carl, I think is worth around nine million, which is a lot. It’s not a lot, I mean, it’s all relative, really. We’re all just trying to make it up in the world. Carl is not some big time guy, I know. He works, just like we all do. But it is nice to drive a Bimmer. I turn the AC to high. I’m not even sure it’s worth it. How would you calculate it, the money? Well, yes, of course, you can count it. But the intangibles? Money itself is an intangible. How do you count an intangible? With the market fluctuating like a seasick stomach, how do you quantify the time and energy you spend making a living, a good living, a million dollars, whatever. I mean really how? Carl would say, you have to look out at the long-term picture. Where you see yourself in five years. Your vision for your life. It’s a standard corporate interview question. But whatever you say, it says a lot about you, it says everything about you, your hopes, dreams, desires, goals, and also what you are going to do about it now, right now. Most people don’t even take the time or effort to imagine themselves, envision themselves or where they want to be in five years. Do I? Yes. Well, somewhat. I mean, I’m not so sure it matters, ultimately. The difference between me and Carl is he really believes this stuff. I think, a part of me thinks, life just happens. Another part of me thinks it’s what you pick up and do with it that makes all the difference. But you don’t know for sure, do you? In real life we’re restrained by time, energy, ambition, insecurity, knowledge--traffic, that’s what it all comes down to, the market, the competition to get in front of each other swerving and swiping desperately to get ahead of the other guy and cut in front, then squeeze the brakes and I’m stuck right in front of the guy I just cut off but now I’m right on the ass of a grey Lexus, in front of the Mercedes turbo diesel fifteen years old, who is this guy kidding, but on the other hand the new Mercedes are so cheap now, under thirty grand, anyone can afford them, any mid-level sales executive who’s strung together two or three good years in a sellers market, right? I mean it isn’t rocket science because if it were, we wouldn’t all be on this fucking L.I.E. bumper to bumper humming along at eighty miles an hour oh shit what’s this stupid fucking asshole doing, whoa, stand on the breaks the Bimmer fishtails out and I’m on the shoulder to the grassy medium for a second, nothing happens, but I imagine the car flipping over, the rag top shredding and then Allen’s and my neck snapping and we’re decapitated and the last thing I see, my head rolling and bouncing into the grassy ditch is my crumpled BMW banged, crushed and compressed as I die. “This fucking sucks. We’re never going to get there,” I say.
“Sure we will. Don’t panic, man. Yeah, Valerie and I hooked up that night. Very cool girl. I really like her. But we didn’t get together again until like a month later. She was still working in the city part time at some media slash advertising agency and I was busy, still kind of dating Georgette, so I didn’t really know where any of it was going. But I did know I liked her.”
“Well, Allen, if there’s any thing you know, it’s what you like.”
“Fuck you man, I don’t know why I put up with your sarcasm, Price.”